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Two Columbus charter schools that opened last fall and then quickly closed are missing thousands
of taxpayer dollars that were never deposited into the appropriate accounts. Columbus police are
investigating.

The schools’ founder, Andre Tucker, is listed in state incorporation papers as creating them,
but he also was a $70,982-a-year employee of his sponsor, the North Central Ohio Educational
Service Center.

After he was hired, Tucker was assigned by the center to work at Talented Tenth — at his schools
— according to a contract he provided yesterday. He previously was an accountant for Honda and had
presided over another failed Columbus charter school.

“They got all the money,” Tucker said of the service center.

State-aid checks were mailed to Tucker, but he immediately turned them over to his sponsor, the
service center, he said.

Under Ohio law, charter-school sponsors aren’t supposed to run the schools but rather to be the
watchdogs for the taxpayers, monitoring schools’ performance and expenditures and ultimately
deciding whether they remain open.

But in the case of the two Talented Tenth schools, the center in effect sponsored itself: All
employees worked for the service center, which also leased the buildings and handled all the money,
officials confirmed yesterday.

Tucker said he wanted to close the schools sooner because of poor attendance, problems with
their Near East Side facilities, fights and poor food service but was ordered to keep them open by
the center.

It’s not uncommon for a sponsor to provide the full range of services that the center provided
Tucker’s schools, said Thomas Holmes, a Cleveland attorney representing the service center. But the
service center was supposed to provide oversight to the school’s governing board, not to Tucker,
Holmes said.

Others disagree.

“It’s totally unacceptable that any type of sponsorship shop should be set up like that,” said
Kathryn Mullen Upton, vice president for sponsorship with the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation.

“It’s not a good system,” state Department of Education spokesman John Charlton said, noting
that a nuance of state law allowed for it. That law gives an educational service center, which is a
regional governmental body designed to support and assist school districts, the power to
essentially create “conversion” charter schools whenever it controls the building that houses the
school, as was the case with both Talented Tenth schools.

“All of these screwy arrangements are a function of totally flawed charter-school law,” said
William L. Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School
Funding. Tucker, Phillis said, should have been working for his school board, not his sponsor.

None of the eight appointed members of the two boards could be reached for comment — most of
their phone numbers listed on the state Department of Education website were disconnected or out of
order yesterday. The only listed member who could be reached, Eldrica Gilbreath-Sanders of
Columbus, said she was not aware that she was ever on the board — she said she simply handed out
fliers for the school.

The state Department of Education was alerted by attorneys for the service center that two
state-aid checks totaling about $7,500 were never received by the schools' fiscal officer nor
deposited into the schools’ bank account.

The attorneys also notified the Columbus city prosecutor’s officer that, “We now know that the
checks have been cashed, although it is not clear where or by what financial institution,” another
document said.